Quarantinology

What will cities be like after COVID-19? What does the mass quarantine resistance test reveal about emerging dynamics in contemporary urbanism, from the public space platform to the new commune of the precarious? Quarantinology is an answer to this question: a catalogue of logistical interventions that explores the history of the quarantined city and speculates on its future.

Through scenes combining illustration, collage, graphic design and interpretive texts, this exhibition raises questions about the dual use and mixed typologies, from disaster urban planning in Japan to Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield (both an airport and a park and refugee shelter).

The exhibition also asks about what aspects of social life can be improved, from love and sex to music festivals and workspaces, intensifying the results to see how strange things can be. Quarantinology addresses core concerns about surveillance, real estate, industrial design and the city as a service, and accepts contradiction and eccentricity as a condition of its method. The exhibition has been co-produced by Urbanbat and the Basque Country Architecture Institute, with the reflections made by Quarantinology Group.

Quarantinology Group is a multidisciplinary collective of researchers who are part of The Terraforming program, a think-tank at the Strelka Institute in Moscow that explores the impending ecological consequences of Anthropocence for urban planning on a planetary scale. During the COVID-19 pandemic, half of the group members were forced to leave Moscow, consolidating a research platform distributed in four countries: Spain, Russia, Germany and Saudi Arabia.